Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

John 8:1-11

This dramatic “midrash” of the story from John was told prior to the scripture reading:

It’s all too easy to throw stones.

Stoning serves many purposes. It quiets anger, satisfies jealousy, provides a scapegoat, transfers shame, masks a guilty conscience, and facilitates control.

Sacred violence is very powerful. To kill in the name of God or God’s law can easily justify our fears and anger, or make our self-righteous hate a holy action that gathers others into its web.

Under the law of Moses there are several offenses worthy of this exercise in execution, so the sacred ritual of throwing stones has long been practiced in our village. Many of the rocks outside our city gates are stained with the sin of those who have broken the law of Moses. And though I am guilty of the sin of which I have been accused, no stones are stained with my blood.

He came to our village, a man we did not know, the man with the piercing eyes. As I stood before my executioners, he touched me, I trembled as I thought he was my accuser, the one to cast the first stone. I bowed my head and prepared to die.

Instead of hurling insults or rocks he turned away from me and toward the angry crowd and in a clear voice he challenged them, “Let anyone who is without sin cast the first stone.” He stood resolute, I thought they would kill him too. Then he knelt down and wrote in the sand with his finger the names of all the men and women of our village who had died of ritual stoning – a daughter, a son, brothers, sisters, a friend. With his words the sacredness of the deadly ritual was broken. Guilt and truth replaced the justification for violence. Fingers loosened their grip on once tightly held instruments of death. As my executioners left, one by one, he turned back toward me and with no accusation in his voice he told me I was forgiven, and to sin no more. As I watched him walk away I searched my soul and asked myself, “exactly what was my sin?”

I had been the property of my father until I was 13, at which time I was given in marriage to a man I did not know and I became his possession. When he died I was given to his brother because property was to be kept in the family. When I outlived him, my son inherited me. By now I was worthless baggage as I was no longer fertile. I found my worth in the arms of a man who was not interested in possessing me but loving me.

What was my sin… that I had disrespected the property rights of those who held power over me? Was I not grateful enough? If I had been purchased would I not have sinned? Did I threaten the economic viability of the family or the community? If I was not punished could all women in the village refuse to be property and expect to be greatly loved?

I soon left my village to find the man with the piercing eyes because I had many questions, and there were frequent rumors of his where-a-bouts. I found him… but not in time to ask my questions. I stood at a distance, with a crowd of women, at a place called Golgotha and watched….

He too had become a victim of legal and sacred violence. But no one was there to write in the sand for him, no one to accuse his accusers.

This man, without even knowing me, said that I was forgiven. Now I watched as he likewise asked God to forgive his tormentors has he hung on the cross.

It was forgiveness that lifted him beyond the rest of us.

Forgiveness…not stones.

This story is not present in our earliest manuscripts of John’s gospel, it simply isn’t there. Many scholars believe this addition doesn’t even show up until as late as the 4^thcentury. Now that could be a whole sermon in itself, but what I find fascinating this morning is wherethe story gets added. It comes right aftera debate among the crowd about whether or not Jesus is the Messiah. Even in Jesus’ time and place, people had all kinds of ideas about the messiah…and Jesus reshaped them all. He re-imagined God for us, re-worked our tribal mindsets and gave us a whole new vision of what the world might be. We’re still shaken by this vision of what life can be, of what he called “God’s Reign” instead of Caesar’s. And nowhere – NOWHERE – is this more apparent than in the way we think about justice, which often looks more like plain ol’ judgment, and how Jesus pursues Grace.

I want to make this story about injustices against women, and there’s plenty of fuel for that. This is not some scenario trapped in history, meaningless to us because, “things like this never happen anymore” – systems that devalue or ignore women, a woman judged with a double standard by a group of men with her life literally or figuratively on the line. Currently there are waves of legislation, in our state and beyond, that seek more and more control over a woman’s body, but never ask any questions about a man’s body, or a man’s role in the reproductive process. We have a former Vice-President and some actions we might dismiss as a simple invasion of personal space, but which really reveal a deeper cultural comment on the bodies of women. I think of comments from colleagues and friends – a woman, in her robe, stole and metal cross necklace, no less – standing in her own church’s narthex, being asked by a visitor if the man walking by is the minister…a clergy friend who is told often that she should work with a local church/pastor without consideration as to whether or not that church/pastor would recognize her ordination, because women pastors are NOT universal…and I had lunch with a clergy colleague the other day and when the bill came – say it with me women in the room, it was set down in front of…me. It’s like every step that is taken forward, there are three steps back, and we know – we KNOW – that this story is about injustice. And I know what I’d like Jesus, the messiah and savior of the world, to do – rain down holy thunder and lightning on the gathered crowd of men. But he doesn’t.

The woman in question in this story from John is not named, not even by her accusers. She’s not even an individual. The text says that the law demands we stone “such women.” She is a typeof woman – a label, a kind that categorically deserves death. Supposedly caught “in the act,” she is the only one dragged into the public square. The man is nowhere to be found, though clearly the accusers know who he is – being caught “in the act” pretty much removes your chances of anonymity. The code from Deuteronomy that prohibits this woman’s activity alsoprohibits the man’s. Heshould be in that public square as well, he should have the arms raised and the stones aimed at his head, too, but he’s nowhere to be found, which makes this text even more convicting as a trap set for Jesus, rather than anything about the supposed “injustice” these men are lifting up.

The unanswered, even unasked, question is – why? Why are these two caught “in the act?” Was this a setup from the beginning, a way to ensnare Jesus by exploiting this relationship which everyone knew about? Did the man also “caught in the act” get released because it was a setup the whole time? Is this a loving relationship or is she a sex worker and, if so, is that by her choice or because it reveals the few options available for women in a patriarchal system that both demands purity and requires lust, a system that values women so minimally?

It is clear from the last line of the passage that even Jesus holds her accountable for something– go, he says, and sin no more. I don’t really know what has happened, or if this woman has really done something “wrong.” What I do know is that when Jesus is asked to denounce her, he refuses, like he does so often, not rejecting the idea of sin, or the reality that we all miss the mark sometimes, but rejecting the idea that we are to be shamed and punished and subjugated because of it. It has to be madecrystal clear, that he rejects the way this is handled. They are trying to trap Jesus to make a public statement and he uses that to call out their hypocrisy, their false piety and the broken system in which they live and breathe and have their being.

Some have questioned a single line in this passage, the one right after they level these charges against this woman and ask him what should be done with her. That line reads, “Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.” What is he writing? Is he writing the commandment from Deuteronomy to emphasize that they have only one party present for this stoning? Maybe, as some suggest, he is writing down the names of the men in that very circle who have alsotaken advantage of this woman, or this “type” of woman, perpetuating the very immorality they claim to be opposing. Then again, maybe he’s just pausing for dramatic effect?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine notes in her feminist companion to John’s Gospel that surprisingly, at the apex of the story, as we sympathize with this woman and imagine her there, surrounded by a group of angry men, “Jesus places the right of execution directlyin the hands of the scribes and Pharisees…each must examine his own life according to the same Law under which the adulterous woman stands judged.” While this is admittedly brilliant strategy on Jesus’ part, I’m not sure how crazy I’d be about it as the accused woman. After all, they can start hurling rocks if just one of themclaims to be without sin and it’s not hard to imagine an alpha-male pumped up on self-righteousness and arrogance making such a claim. But they don’t. The awareness of their own sin settles in on them and they walk away, disarmed of their capacity to wield their judgment on others.

Jesus, we should note, doesn’t judge them, either. He doesn’t judge anyone in this story, though if Jesus is the one without sin, God in the flesh, as our tradition says, then he, by his own rule, is the onlyone who can judge the men and this woman, now left alone, standing in the hot sand as Jesus looks up. No one has condemned you? Neither do I – go and sin no more.

I wantto make this story about Jesus rebuking the patriarchy, which I still think is true. And others want to make it a clarification of the reality of sin, and how even though we aren’t supposed to judge, we are all still guilty of missing the mark, which is also true. I wonder if this story helps us to see a Jesus who doesn’t operate on “either-or” and, while dedicated to justice, is trying to get us to step outside our carefully constructed boxes, if only for a moment. It is as if he doesn’t want us to simply switch sides in a self-righteous game, where we judge the judges, or hate the haters, and that makes it all alright. I believe that the story wants to place us in a spot where we have a difficult time with who is the “good guy” and who is the “bad guy” precisely because it is such a human thing operate in a polarity. We always divide the story up in sides and equally as often write ourselves into the role of the good guy.

“Let he who is without sin” and “go and sin no more” have the same impact – they are words of grace in an ungracious time. Grace, to be clear, is not forgiveness or absolution. Those things require repentance and restitution. Grace is the radical notion that we are all loved by God regardless of what we do. It is a concept both reassuring and disturbing, one that we love when it is aimed at us and despise when it is shown to those we disparage. That is why I think that we see it only in Jesus. It’s not as if this woman suddenly pours out grace on her accusers. Why should she? She is trapped in a system that absolutely devalues and destroys her. And the men? They are happy to getgrace, but in no danger, I suspect, of being tainted by it enough to dole it out.

That’s the same for all of us, for I don’t think this story is meant to teach us all to have God’s grace, a Grace I do not understand and struggle to accept. If there’s one thing I am clear about from a long tenure in ministry, it’s that there is a God and I am not Her. I cannot dole out such grace. I am about justice, and my justice is pretty limited and awfully judgy. So, can I hear this morning how Jesus is steering us away from the propensity to refine our abilities of judgment and towards trusting in God’s Grace, letting it shape how we see ourselves and our world? Can I accept how God’s grace sets us free from the constant tennis match of judgment – not because accountability isn’t important, it is crucial – but because it isactually liberating when you become aware of sin as something that unifies us in our incompleteness, rather than a weapon to be used against your so-called opponent. Jesus wants more than just a revolution, he seeks a revolution of our hearts, pushing us to see the humanity and divinity in each of us so deeply that we decide to leave the judgment to God, transforming the world in steps – from vengeance and the settling of scores to justice and then, finally, to a world filled with Grace – wasteful, expansive, amazing Grace.

Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Psalm 32 1-2 & 8-11

Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner tells the story of leading a tour of the prayer hall with the preschool children from the congregation. He takes them to the front of the sanctuary to show where the ark is, where they store the torah scroll behind a large, floor to ceiling curtain. He was just about to ask what was behind the curtain and do the big reveal when he notices the preschool teacher looking straight at him and tapping her watch which, he says, is an old Talmudic gesture meaning to wrap it up, bucko! So he tells them that at their next meeting he’ll show them what’s behind the curtain, and it’s very special…and sends them off with a shalom and they walk behind their teacher like little ducklings back to class. Well, the next day the teacher shows up in his office to tell him that apparently the preceding day’s hastily cancelled lesson has provoked quite a discussion of what is indeed behind the “very special” curtain. She told him there are currently four possibilities, according to four different kids.

The first kid, obviously destined to become a philosophy professor, suggests that behind that curtain is absolutely nothing. Such nihilism at such a young age. The next kid imagines a Jewish holy thing of some sort, fairly non-descriptive but important. Another kid, probably from watching too much morning TV says that behind that curtain is a brand new car!! And lastly is the kid who tells them they’re all wrong…behind that curtain is a giant mirror. A four-year old somehow knows that in the words of ancient scripture she would encounter herself, for this is the role of this old, old, stories, some of which make little sense to us anymore. It’s not rulebook or instruction manual, it is a mirror, helping us to see ourselves in new ways, with old words.

This is indeed what must happen with this parable of the lost sons, most often known as the parable of the “Prodigal Son”, though the word prodigal is never used in this passage, it’s a title added much later. Though it is one of the most commonly known parables, next to probably the “Good Samaritan,” Luke is surprisingly the only gospel where this parable can be found. It is familiar to us –veryfamiliar. Likewise it’s meaning is already clear – this is a parable about repentance and forgiveness, right? The younger son is us, the father is…well, THE Father, and the older son is the “bad guy,” not finding the grace that the father gives so freely.

Well, not so fast. The lectionary cut we have for today makes sure to place the parable within it’s context, as part of a conversation between Jesus and his critics, who are shocked by his dining companions. They are scandalized by who he has decided to welcome to his table, these “sinners.” And, you know, birds of a feather flock together – you’ll be known by the company you keep. That’s not just a saying from our time, but actually written in Proverbs 13. So, Jesus was hanging out with the “wrong” kind of people. And in response to this charge, this utterance of what was common sense, found in scripture, Jesus tells this parable, turning the conversation on its head.

In fact he tells three parables, just to drive his point home, the lost sheep, the lost coin and then the lost sons. And in all three cases, the theme is notcontrition and forgiveness, it is welcome and grace. The sheep isn’t apologetic, the coin never says, “I’m sorry,” and there is no forgiveness given, only celebration of the lost being found. And the same is true of the prodigal. The son never apologizes, the father never forgives. It is as if the parable is not meant to teach us some easily digestible message, but rather reminds us of the way that God works, that infuriating, grace-filled love, which is something we already know, but just can’t quite swallow.

When we begin this story with the father as protagonist, the younger son as pitiable foil and the older son as callous jerk, then the mirror that a parable could be becomes more of a script, with all of the parts playing out predictably. Parables, however, work best with the game of “what ifs.” As a colleague, the Rev. Jes Kast, said on Twitter yesterday, “What if the story of the Prodigal Son is not about a son who messed up, but about a Father who messed up and disowned his son who was gay or transgender and finally repents and the celebration is a Dad who says to his son “I see you and affirm YOU. I was wrong. I love you?” What if it’s about how eachchild feels righteous, and stands firm, demanding the other side come to them, when all God wants is for us to eat dinner together? What if it’s about the mother, who is never mentioned, who laments teaching this boy to have such willfulness, leaving her wallowing in her prideful inability to show her wounds and her shameful dedication to the expectations of culture over her son’s direction? There are a lot of “what ifs” to be had in this single story.

So, maybe I ought to treat this like a therapist – so when you ask me what this parable means, I answer – I don’t know. What do youthink it means? And then, of course, as you come up with answers, I’d ask you to consider the version of the story that is the least palatable to you. If the reading only makes you comfortable, then perhaps you look again. For this is what a look in the mirror does, it might make us notice that our hair looks particularly good that day – well, at least someof us – but it likely also reveals the flaws we know and try to conceal or deny. So, who are you in this parable? Which son are you? Are you the father, or the absent mother? Are you the grumbling religious authorities to whom these stories of the lost are told? Are you the narrator, speaking to someone about the complicated scenarios that face us as human beings, trying to share how things aren’t always so cut and dry, and our morality or sense of justice not so easily “right” or “wrong?”

We live in times of great moral confusion. And while we are most often offered a binary solution – right and wrong, good and evil, neatly packaged and separated, the ethical and moral dimension that Jesus always presents us with resists such simplicity. Jesus encourages us not to refine our sense of judgment, but to hone our capacity to love, which stands quite against our inclination to pick and side and to win the battle, whatever that battle may be. Those battles, I’m afraid, are often fought in the dark, and in the light of day things can look quite different than they do when we are flailing away with our sword of righteousness.

As the work was happening for not only this sermon, but the artwork that you see hanging up here this morning, the good Rev. Curry emailed me a selection from some of the reflections that inmates at David L. Moss produce, this one from a guy named Brett. Brett, in reflecting on his own journey of healing, writes that alcoholics and drug addicts often have “the opportunity to have two lives, one on self-will and one on God’s will.” It is those people who truly understand the language of coming to their senses, as the text says, of coming to their selves, as the Greek actually says. They understand, if they are lucky enough to find someone else to receive their newfound sense, what it means to be dead and then alive again, the true essence of being “reborn.”

Brett says that, “I was lucky enough to experience a life full of “myself” will;

living on my terms, my attitude and actions and the consequences one receives living a life of self will and pain.” Of course, not many would look at that as “lucky,” but Brett’s “rebirth” came when he, “had a spiritual awakening.” “I now,” he writes, “get to live a life on God’s will doing what is in front of me working to become a better person,

asking for God’s guidance and direction in every part of my life.”

I’m not sure that this is what is going on with the youngest son. To be frank, I don’t really trust him. I still feel, even after he returns, like he is again taking advantage of his father’s love, like he is doing what he has always done. But for any of us who have been used by someone, someone who we know has a sickness but still makes us angry, this younger son sets off some alarms. And the older son seems so lost in his own bitterness and resentment that he can’t take even the smallest of steps in a positive direction. From this perspective, both sons are lost. Perhaps this is why the father reacts the way he does.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt. Dr. Levine urges us not to rush to read repentance and forgiveness into this parable. We have been programmed to think thatparables draw a contrast between what Jesus taught and what “the Jews” generally understood. Thus, the Prodigal Son teaches about a loving God, whereas Judaism teaches an angry, vengeful God. But a loving, forgiving, gracious God is not an invention of Jesus, it is part of the Judaism from which he preached and taught. Dr. Levine suggests we ought to let parables provoke us more deeply, to consider how Jesus was provoking his own audience to things they were already aware of and, in the case of this parable of lost sons to a pretty radical idea of just how subversive welcome can be. It’s something we already know about. What happens when we choose to invite someone in first, before we deem them worthy, before we see an olive branch in their hand, before we know that everything will work out the way we want it to? What is the best way, one might ask, to get the wayward to return?

Dr. Levine writes, “Do whatever it takes to find the lost – sheep, coin or child, – and then celebrate with others…Don’t wait until you receive an apology; you may never get one. Don’t wait until you can muster the ability to forgive; you may never find it…instead, go have lunch. Go, celebrate, and invite others to join you. If the repenting and the forgiving come later, so much the better. And if not, you will still…have begun a process that might lead to reconciliation. Take advantage of resurrection,” she writes, “it is unlikely to happen twice.”

I don’t know if I can hear that interpretation, much less implement it. Such a selfless approach takes a hard look in the mirror, my friends, though I think that we know it is true that we welcome before we belong, before we forgive, before we repent. Nevertheless, such a way of reading this parable is challenging and difficult and doesn’t really make sense in my way of structuring relationships, values and my own sense of righteousness. Which makes me think it’s probably pretty close to Jesus’ intent…showing us a God who’s love is different than ours, who’s goals are different than ours, and who’s grace is much wider, much broader that ours. It’s hard, maybe nearly impossible to expand our hearts that much, to extend ourselves so far out onto that branch, all in the name of God’s kin-dom.

Can you imagine what the world would look like if we did?

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Psalm 63:1-8 & Luke 13:1-9

March 24^th– LENT III

Thursday morning I left the house earlier than usual. With spring break, I had no “getting kids ready for school” duties, and many of my regular meetings for the week had been cancelled. So, I took the chance to get to the coffeeshop early and do some writing. On my way down 41^stheaded to Riverside, I could see the biggest, most amazing full moon, still pretty high in the western sky, it seemed to me. Then the glare hit me in my rear-view mirror as the bright red sun rose in the east. In that one moment, I could see the yesterday fading in one direction and the day to come rising in the other. It’s rare to be faced with both sides of the scale in such a direct way. Of course that often happens – the moon and the sun at the same time, the night and the day not nearly as separated as we often think of them. It’s not often so visible, though, which gives way to us thinking that these two “sides” are opposites, not connected parts of a circle.

The psalmist sings of this balance for us today, as we hear a prayer to God – a petition, actually – that is attributed to King David. It’s written from “the wilderness,” full of praise and the claims to need only God and God’s presence. “I seek you,” the song sings, “my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” I’ll admit it’s not a feeling I readily know. I mean there are times that I long for the transcendent, and times that prayer and fasting – from food, from social media, from the flow of life — can help me find meaning. But more often I find the presence of God right in the middle of life — in a good meal shared with friends, in a long walk, a good conversation rather than a vow of silence.

It can be easy to read a psalm like this and think that your faith efforts pale in comparison to the monk-ish discipline of “David,” seeking God with “all of his being.” That’s why our lectionary editing is so critical. What you heard this morning is a perfect Lent cut, full of the sacrifice and dedication that we’re supposed to have during this “somber” season of reflection. What better way to solidify that than have a psalm extolling such virtues, using words like “meditate,” “seek,” “thirst,” and “faint?” Maybe that’s why the lectionary reading stops right after all of this “smoke-blowing” directed at the God whose, “steadfast love is better than life.”

But the psalm goes on. The last few verses read:

But those who seek to destroy my life
shall go down into the depths of the earth;
they shall be given over to the power of the sword,
they shall be prey for jackals.
But the king shall rejoice in God;
all who swear by him shall exult,
for the mouths of liars will be stopped.

In other words, after all of that praise and discipline and soul-searching, David’s petition is for the crushing of his enemies, as if all of the praise is just buttering up God so that God’s judgment can be used in David’s favor. It seems like maybe someone needs to fast a little longer.

Of course, that might be how we think of God – a great wizard behind the cosmic curtain, available to deliver to us heart, or brain, or courage. But God is no vending machine, and judgment and mercy are not separate sides, one the full moon and one the rising sun. It’s a difficult lesson to learn, so difficult that Jesus has many, many parables about it. That’s the sure way to know what the teacher wants you to learn, look at the syllabus.

The story of the bent-over woman, is the story of a woman alone in the deepest sense of that word…without a name, forgotten, discarded, neglected, suffering, so ignored that she is literally bent over so her face is not visible. It is a story of God’s judgment and God’s mercy, met together…delivered together…experiencedtogether. This is what makes Jesus so controversial and dangerous in his time. He announces God’s mercy to those on whom the culture has pronounced judgment and he pronounces judgment on the ones who are supposedly recipients of God’s grace and mercy, helping both sides connect to the circle…helping us all to understand judgment apart from shame and mercy apart from absolution.

The story of the so-called “bent woman” comes after the scripture reading for today from the lectionary. But they are connected. The reading speaks of God’s judgment using perhaps two historical events for Luke’s audience, events that are lost to us now. One is some grisly event in which Pilate mingles the blood of Galileans with their sacrifices, perhaps a reference to a massacre of a group of Galilean pilgrims in Jerusalem. The other is the “tower of Siloam” which apparently collapses and kills many people. In both cases, Jesus raises the age-old theological quandary – where is God in suffering? He asks the gathered directly – do you think that these people did something wrong and therefore this tragedy was punishment from God? His answer is unequivocal – nope. That’s not how God works.

But it may be how wework. We pick winners and losers all the time. Our systems are completely structured by this…even the democracy that we supposedly enjoy here in the US of A could be seen as nothing more than the tyranny of the majority, or even the tyranny of the electoral college. Just a couple of years ago we had a debate held in the public forum. One side said, “Black Lives Matter.” Another side said, “all lives matter.” These two “sides” were presented often as if they were opposing sides, as if they were separate ideas, when the reality is that both are true, but they impact us the same way as Jesus presents us with God’s judgment and God’s mercy. If you are a person who has witnessed and experienced the very direct and costly ways that the culture around you does not value you in the same way as others based, in the only logic conclusion, on the color of your skin, then saying, “all lives matter” is not a display of mercy. It is not even true. It is only true IF black lives matter…and they don’t, at least according to any reasonable quantification of economics, criminal justice, employment, housing, etc. When we can effectively say that black lives DO matter, and the statistics bear that out, then, and only then, can we say that ALL lives matter. But by that time, we’ll probably have some other lives to pay attention to because ALL lives matter is a goal, not a destination. You never arrive, because there is always someone else to include, someplace else to visit, some other group or individual who is ignored, left out, forgotten.

We seem to have lost this capacity, perhaps no where more so than in this country. As we all reel from the shootings in Christchurch, and we bear witness to a nation that has not even waited until all of the funerals have happened to take decisive and bold action on the weapons of murder in their midst, we might be tempted to some introspection. After all, New Zealand is not exactly an unarmed nation. And they have gun ranges and their own version of the NRA. They have an opposition party in their government, but all of these agencies are on board with the change.

It makes me wonder. Has our glib “all lives matter” dismissal hardened our hearts so much that we cannot even see what lives don’t matter? And does that have a theological foundation? Has a fundamentalist theology, one that clearly designates winners and losers, one that makes God into a cosmic vending machine, doling out blessings and punishments on the good and the wicked, always demarcated neatly, one which has permeated our culture so deeply…has this theology shaped our hearts so inwardly that we are not able to feel in the same way that the kiwis have felt for one another…has it twisted us so much that we are incapable of seeing ourselves in other people, other religions, other identities, other nationalities, other, other, other?

I don’t want to think that. It feels so much like a judgment to me. Yet God’s judgment, in one way of looking at it, is an ever present gift. What Jesus reminds us is that God’s judgment always comes alongside God’s mercy. This is why Jesus wants to talk endlessly about repentance. Repentance has also gotten a bum rap. Jesus calls us to “turn around,” which is what repentance means, and we’ve made this into a singular event. We repent, get baptized and everything’s cool. Only it’s not. We continue to screw up, to act out of jealousy or anger, to break our word, to lie, to game the system in our favor and call it “hard work,” to close the door on some people because “The Bible Says” and call it “love.” We continue to be unable to experience someone else’s loss deeply enough to let us change us. Repentance is a journey. Jesus keeps bringing it up because we must keep doing it. It is our engagement with the divine circle that is God’s judgment and God’s grace and mercy.

Perhaps the more important thing for the story of the “bent over woman” to give to us is just that – for she is “seen” by so many in her time in the public square. They don’t know her name…WE don’t know her name. Her pain is visible and constant, yet we look for ways that this is herfault, we look away lest we imagine how we might end up there. Instead of opening our hearts with compassion, we take more vitamins, or insulate ourselves with possessions, or keep up with our yoga to insure our bodies never, ever fail. We keep the story at arms’ length, for fear of what it is really asking us to do.

Her story asks us to reconsider how we have ordered the world. It asks us to think about our own resources, about deserving and not deserving, about our “self-made-ness”, our obligations, the “common good,” the call on us when we have accepted that we are children of God to return the favor to others, too. In one way of looking at it, it is God’s judgment, shining a light on our so-called “wisdom.” Jesus standing with and for this woman whose name no one knows, comes in the long litany of actions in which Jesus, the son of God…Jesus, the messiah…Jesus, the savior of the world, gives away his power. He sees suffering and casts love not blame, he has power and gives it away. We, the parable tells us, don’t see at all…or we see and we disregard. When faced with a decision that asks us to consider being loving we instead ask, where are the figs? What value is this tree to me? What do I get out of this?

It’s as if the church doesn’t have a vision problem, it has a love problem. We don’t even know what love is, despite the many examples Jesus gives to us. If all lives did indeed matter, we wouldn’t have to saythat all lives matter. And if all lives truly did matter, we wouldn’t have to say black lives matter. But we do, because they don’t. We do, because we see and disregard. We do, because we still don’t know what love means. We get defensive when the judgment comes our way, rather than seeing it like the full moon in front of us, with God’s mercy rising like the sun behind us, part of a spiritually-vibrant circle. My yoke is easy, Jesus reminds us, my burden is light, but it is real, my friends. It asks us to be better, to try harder, to seek God’s love and then to make it manifest in the world through our own hearts and hands and feet. It is a love that begins at the cross, made manifest in opposition to our system of winners and losers, our animosity and divisions and hate, our quoting of “the rules,” and our insistence on knowing the heart of God. The good news is that despite our stubbornness, God just keeps on being God…

Thanks be to God.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

The story of Hagar (or Ha’jar in Arabic), written by Susan Murphy and Rev. Sheri Curry told from Hebrew perspective at the beginning of service:

NARRATOR:

In the Hebrew texts, Hagar is an Egyptian slave to Sarah

Sarah – who is the wife of Abraham and the mother of Isaac.

In the Quran, the Holy Book of Islam,

Hagar is the daughter of an Egyptian king

gifted to Ibrahim to be his wife.

Whether slave or princess,

in both stories she is the mother of Ishmael

who finds herself alone in the wilderness.

Here is the midrash of Hagar based on the Hebrew text.

HAGAR:

You know me as Hagar, the Egyptian slave of Sarah,

concubine to Abraham, and mother of Ishmael.

My story is found in the Book of Genesis – the Book of Beginnings.

I have always assumed that I was born the property of my masters

as I have never known anything but servitude.

I was taught early to serve my captors well.

When my barren mistress offered me to her husband Abraham

as a surrogate to bear the son of a promised covenant . . .

a covenant with a God I did not know,

I fulfilled my duty because, of course, there was no choice.

As this covenant child grew in my body,

I began to experience something I had never known before.

It was the feeling of power – power toward my mistress

who grew more jealous by the day.

My power enraged her and soon I was suffering under her mistreatment of me.

There came a time when I could no longer stand the pain of abuse

and decided that the only relief for me was to face the wilderness.

So, I ran away into the desert knowing that death awaits . . . but so did hope.

It was by the spring on the road to Shur

that the God of Many Names found me and spoke.

I was overcome with awe

as this God assured me that my descendants would be so many

that they could not be counted,

for their multitude would be great.

It resembled a promise that had been made to my master . . .

God had chosen me too!

In that moment, I named the God of my experience.

“You are El-roi,” I said, “The God of vision. For I have seen God and lived.”

And not only did I live but I was changed forever.

In that moment of wilderness with God at my side

I understood that I was loved and had purpose.

I may be regarded as less than,

and my body used by those who held physical and social power over me,

but no longer could anyone destroy my worth.

By the waters of the spring I was made new,

I would never again be defined by the power of others.

And God sent me back . . .

not to suffer

but to claim for my son his right to be a prince,

to be trained and educated

so he too could fulfill the dream of the God of Promise.

And he grew in strength and wisdom and favor in the sight of his father Abraham.

Then the God of Covenant opened the womb of my mistress

and she too gave birth to a son that they named Isaac.

I watched with pride as our boys grew and played together.

But my mistress soon felt threatened by our presence.

So, she gave her husband Abraham an ultimatum,

“Cast out this slave woman and her son,

for the son of this slave shall not inherit along with mychild.”

And early one morning after giving me a loaf of bread and a skin of water,

Abraham placed my son on my shoulders

and sent us into the desert

where once again I faced the wilderness.

When the water in the skin was finally gone and the bread was eaten,

I placed my child under a sun parched bush

and then distanced myself to wait for this child of promise to die.

I could not stand to look upon the death of my child.

Across the sand I could hear Ishmael cry –

God heard too – and called my name.

“Hagar lift up your child and give him a drink.”

Suddenly, I noticed a well of water!

We drank . . . and made our home in that wilderness.

The God of Vision remained true to our covenant.

My child grew up to father 12 sons

ancestors of Islam.

I am Hagar –

a woman of wilderness and water,

promise and destiny.

I am grandmother of a nation,

and I have known God.

The Courage of Vulnerability

Gen. 15:1-12; 17-18 & Luke 13:34-35

The story of Hagar is different depending on who tells it. In the Jewish tradition, Hagar is the lesser figure, a slave girl, who is the mother of Abraham’s first child, Ishmael. But in the Muslim telling, Hagar isn’t a slave girl, she’s a princess – given to Abraham as a wife during an exile in Egypt. The end result is very similar, in that Sarah does finally have Isaac late in age and gets jealous of the attention given to Ishmael, born to Hagar, so she orders Hagar and Ishmael banished. It is in that banishment, when God tells Abraham to abandon Hagar and Ishmael in the desert with no water, that Hagar’s faith is rewarded with water flowing from the ground at the place that will come to be known as Mecca. In Islam, Hagar, pronounced “Hajar” in Arabic, is lifted up as a wise and courageous woman, a model of faith. Whether princess or slave, a woman treated this way – cast out and left for dead with her son – may seem a strange model for faith.

And it is precisely that faith that I want to talk about this morning.

Hagar’s is a faith forged by an unwillingness to let other people define you, to believe the lie that you are not enough, that’s God’s creation of you was somehow incomplete or inferior. It is the faith born of hardship and struggle, not a faith that comes neatly wrapped and complete, but rather a faith that develops, that is honed by people willing to face vulnerability, sometimes chosen vulnerability and more often vulnerability that is forced upon them. Hagar’s faithful action leans into that vulnerability and seeks God in the midst of it.

Researcher Dr. Brene Brown says that we think of vulnerability as a negative emotion, the “core of fear and shame and uncertainty.” Our response, then, is to resist our vulnerability by developing armor, or coping techniques to avoid that vulnerability. Yet, she claims, vulnerability is actually the beginningof all of the positive emotions – empathy, compassion, love, joy. Only when we let ourselves be vulnerable can we experience these things. Love is a wonderful thing, but also very risky – if you give your heart away, it might get broken. Compassion is a tremendous thing, but you’ll surely find that when you are compassionate, you will get taken advantage of, or mistreated. Empathy is desperately needed right now – I think we’ll all agree – but empathy often asks us to consider our most vulnerable times, to place ourselves back in situations which were painful, which arepainful, and to face that pain again so we might help someone else. If we have armored up, if we have denied ourselves into numbness over that pain, such empathy is impossible. We want to encourage othersaway fromthat weakness instead, making love something sentimental and weak, instead of reminding ourselves that Love is strongest at the point of greatest vulnerability, at the mark of a nail, at a place of imminent death – physical or metaphysical.

Vulnerability, Brown says, is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and the word that makes us all nervous – change. And it is displayed, in her research, by people who she calls “whole-hearted.” They are people with courage, she says, which is distinguished from bravery. Brown reminds us that courage comes from the Latin cor– “heart” – and defines courage as living from the heart, being “whole-hearted,” the willingness to embrace our vulnerability in order to be our authentic selves. It’s found in the capacity to say “I love you” first, the disposition to do something with no guarantees of outcome, the willingness to breathe through waiting for the doctor to call after the MRI. It is found with a measure of personal endurance or resilience, to be sure, and also found in a network, a support group, a community, a family of faith that stands up with and for you when you cannot endure, when you are not – at least by yourself – resilient enough.

But in order for that kind of connection to happen, we have to let ourselves be seen, reallyseen. We have to let ourselves be vulnerable, as vulnerable as Hagar seems to be in the desert, when all hope is lost. And that is not a welcome spot for most of us. When faced with that kind of exposure, more often we numb, we justify, we scapegoat. We are the most addicted, entertained, distracted generation in history, and we point fingers as well as anyone. Yet when we numb or avoid our sadness, grief, pain, or struggle, Dr. Brown’s research tells us, we also numb our happiness, joy, liberation, and gratitude. Faithful courage, then, born of our vulnerability, might be the kind of whole-hearted living that comes from believing that as God’s children we are enough and that those around us are also God’s beloved children and therefore deserve our love, empathy, and respect. In the wake of another mass murder at another house of worship, again motivated by words of hate, white supremacy and xenophobia, it is hard to see that spirit out there at all.

Yet, on Friday at afternoon Jum’mah prayers at the Islamic Society of Tulsa, dozens of people from the interfaith community gathered to simply stand in solidarity. We held signs that have been, in a comment both heartbreaking and inspiring, in the back of my car since the Pittsburgh shooting. We simply culled out the ones with Jewish-specific references and the ones with Spanish on them from our visit to a local church with a large immigrant population, and held up the “I Stand With You” and the “You Belong Here” signs with smiles and tears…and we were greeted with the same. And there we stood, people who don’t know each other for the most part, but people who clearly understand each other. We let our guard down on that big slab of concrete between the doors of the mosque and the parking lot, vulnerable to the simple humanity that exists in each of us. Many of the worshippers walked around the entire circle, shaking hands, giving hugs, stepping over their own fear and rage and grief, moving through their own vulnerability to say thank you to us for a willingness to be exposed and to step into the vulnerable places.

We seem somehow to know in the days that immediately follow such awfulness that we need each other, but then we can forget that again, we can retreat back into our supposedly safe spaces, where our vulnerability is mediated. Yet this is the very time we mustlean into the vulnerable places, seeking to encounter and understand the unknown, meeting “the other” and finding that they aren’t quite so “other,” as we find the presence of a God who makes a well for us in the desert of our isolation and fear, giving us living water to drink.

That is the courage that so many of these unheard voices from scripture give to us, like a small gift that we pass over at first. Just as I think that we ought to pay attention to the symbol of faithfulness being presented to us in our Bible as a foreign slave girl, I want us to also pay attention to the people being lifted up as heroes from the massacre in New Zealand, for they all have one thing in common: they don’t claim the title hero. They acted, or reacted, in the moment and seem to clearly understand that courage comes not in those moments, but in showing up at the mosque the next day, to clean the blood and wipe the tears, to cry and wail with the community, and to seek the next step forward. We see this whole-hearted courage in the faces of that Muslim community in Christchurch, as we see it in the faces of foster families, believing in the children that others won’t believe in…in the faces of those who continue to stitch up the wounds, to remove the bullets, to heal the broken bones and shattered psyches, bearing the trauma, seeking the good, moving with courage towards whole-heartedness.

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those who were sent to you! How often I have wanted to gather your people just as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. But you didn’t want that.” Jesus stands on the outskirts of Jerusalem, having been warned of Herod’s intentions and sees the familiar pattern laid out before him. Jesus knows that those who follow him won’t act as Hagar acts, trusting in God to provide and find a way. We will refuse to be gathered up, we little chicks, relying on ourselves alone and finding that little help when the fox comes to eat. But he models faithfulness for us anyway – like prophets before him. He has every chance to avoid the challenges and responsibilities he knows are coming, yet he decides to live this whole-hearted life, leaning into the vulnerability, confident that God has given him what he needs and will be with him…and we bear witness to his courage.

I am not saying that we need to take the precise path of Jesus – martyrdom and death on a cross. He has already done that for us! Iamsaying that we can develop a greater confidence that God is with us and has given us sufficient resources to not simply endure challenge, but to flourish! So that when injustice presents itself, as it always does, we are not intimidated by our vulnerability, but we embrace it, knowing that all birth comes with pain, all innovation comes from vulnerability, all life comes from death. If we trust like Hagar trusted, like Jesus trusted, we understand that the call is for courage to set our shields down, to remove our armor, not so that we might be slaughtered, but so we can understand how to resist injustice without creating more injustice, so that we might truly know that hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. God has given us what we need – our own hearts, pliable and resilient, the tools of hope and dedication, and God has given us a community to stand for and with one another so that we might bear witness to God’s reliability in the most vulnerable of places. That’s what we call faith.

Singing:  I will trust in the Lord, I will trust in the Lord,

                 I will trust in the Lord, ’til I die.

Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Rizpah’s “story” — written by Susan Murphy and edited by Rev. Sheri Curry, was told at the beginning of service:

Narrator:

Saul was the first king of Israel – a religious man and the people’s choice. The second king was David – God’s appointed. Between the two reigns was a lingering civil war. During this time of hostility, wilderness, and famine, it seemed as if the people had forgotten how to be human – how to be the community God called them to be.

Rizpah:

I am Rizpah, a concubine of King Saul, and mother of two of his sons –

Armoni and Mephibosheth (Muh-fib’-oh-sheth)

In the war between the House of Saul and the House of David, Saul was killed and David is king.

In the intervening years of civil war, the people of Israel had grown accustomed to hatred, vengeance, and death. The earth was sick with blood.

Yet, the war was nothing compared to our personal wilderness. The rains had not come for 3 years. Each day we lowered our jars a little further down into the wells. The crops were dying. Our skin cracked and peeled like the dry earth that spiders across the land. Soon the wells would be as dry as the parched earth.

It was a widely held belief in Israel that the famine was caused by bloodguilt on Saul. The Gibeonite people accused Saul of genocide, “Give us the heirs of Saul”, they cried, “the God of Israel will be pleased with our sacrifice, and will send the rain!”

King David listened to their request and handed over 7 of Saul’s heirs to be impaled on the mountain top. Two of them were my beautiful sons. The bodies of the dead were left there exposed to the elements. It was the consequence of war. It was political necessity. It was religious legitimacy. It was vengeance. No one else even seemed to notice the violence, they just watched the skies for rain that did not come.

My heart was as parched as the land. And though I was powerless to stop the sacrifice of my sons, my soul could not rest. In my grief I took sackcloth and spread it on a rock next to the gallows. For 5 months, from the beginning of the harvest until the rains fell from heaven, I did not allow the birds of the air to come on their bodies by day, nor the wild animals by night.

Alone on that weary rock, I gave honor to my sons and to those who died at the hands of vengeance and superstition.

I am told that there were whispers in the tents of the village below about a woman who kept vigil over the bodies of the dead. At first a curious few began to hike the mountain trails to get a glimpse of this “WOMAN ON THE MOUNTAIN’ as they called me.

One evening, I noticed that a partially filled jug of water had been left near my rock. I felt gratitude… I kept vigil. A few days later, a well-worn but useful blanket appeared. Hope stirred in me. I kept my vigil.

Later a small pillow fashioned of goat hair was quietly left for me near the place of death. I knew I was not alone. Soon, almost daily, scant offerings of figs, dates, fish, and even twigs for the fire found their way to my hallowed side of the mountain. Always I kept my vigil.

During those 5 months, no one ever spoke or broke the sanctity of my wilderness….but hearts were changing.

Narrator:They say that at night, from the safety of their tents, the people of the village could hear Rizpah’s cries of lament to a God of mercy and compassion, not a God of power and vengeance. Eventually, King David heard of her courage and compassion, and his heart, too, was moved. He went to Jabesh where the unclaimed bones of Saul were buried. He exhumed the remains, and as a symbol of reconciliation, returned Saul to his homeland, where he was buried, along with the bodies of his 7 heirs, in the tomb of Kish, Saul’s father. Once Saul was returned to his ancestors, famine gave way to rain, and goodness returned to the earth.

Identity Theft

2 Samuel 21:10-13 & Luke 4:1-13

The symbolism for the next 6 weeks of Lent is right here on our chancel – this water pump, surrounded by a beautiful wood structure designed to mimic a well, a deep well, from which you would draw life-giving water. It is the purpose of this Lenten season, after all, is that we take time to replenish ourselves, not only by resting, but by going deeper, wrestling with our own adversary. Lent is supposed to mirror the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness, facing identity challenges from the devil.

It doesn’t have to be bread, power and safety, of course. The temptations can be for anything, because the real issue is the temptation itself. We tend to think of temptation as something we are directed towards, something as concrete as ice cream or as abstract as a lie to save face. But temptation is just as often what we walk away from – like our trust in God, or our identity as beloved children of God.

The story of Rizpah comes to us as an example of such temptation, though it might not be readily apparent. Maybe this is the first time you have ever heard this story, as it is relegated to only two paragraphs in 2^ndSamuel, and Rizpah, though mentioned by name, never says a word in the story. In fact, for some of what was presented earlier, we had to depend on what is called “midrash” – stories that are written outside of scripture to help fill in the gaps, or to wonder what happened beyond the written words we have in the Bible.

Sometimes we have to look really, really hard for the signs of God’s action, even in the stories in which we’re toldwhat God is doing. We are told, after all, that all of the brutality in this story is a response to God’s drought…the cut-off of rain as a punishment for some political slight, the “bloodguilt on Saul and on his house, because he put the Gibeonites to death,” when he was supposed to honor a treaty and spare them. David, the king after Saul, seeks to reconcile Israel to the Gibeonites and end God’s drought punishment, and so he seemingly without remorse or pause sends seven of Saul’s descendants to a brutal death. Now, it could be noted that in doing so, David also sends 7 men to their deaths who could be considered candidates for the throne of Israel, and calls it the “will of God,” but that’s another midrashic speculation. At very least we ought to be quite familiar, toofamiliar, with the narrative of God’s will used to justify ourviolence. This is the temptation for David, to protect his power by any means necessary, including violence that he can pass off onto God.

Then, enter Rizpah. Not the wife, but the concubine, of Saul, she is virtually powerless to save her sons and so when we see her it is in the role commonly found for women, not only in the ancient Mediterranean world, but in many cultures to this day – the person who laments. Her lament will certainly not bring back her sons, and it may initially seem futile. She might have been tempted to simply retreat into the shadows, one of the only available options for her as a woman in this patriarchal culture. She was being told by the actions all around her that she didn’t matter, her sons didn’t matter. Yet, like Jesus, she refuses the identity forced upon her and takes the only avenue open to resist the natural order of things.

By lamenting in the way she does, Rizpah goes deep, claiming her own identity by refusing to simply play the role assigned to her, to grieve for the appropriate amount of time and move on in silent complicity. Her resistance is an incredibly human response to the forces that assault, violate and obscure human dignity. Like a reporter turning the cameras on the separation of families on our border, like the Crutcher family here in Tulsa, unwilling to simply let their loved ones’ murder be dismissed to the microfilm on the historical record, Rizpah says noto the order of things, and it is her lament that finally breaks through. Rizpah does something that women have done all over the world, throughout history – she cares for the dead in ways that the patriarchal system would not even care for the living. In that resistance, she claims her identity.

Soon, during Holy Week, we will witness the lives of women who stay at the foot of the cross, who bear the grief and lament, who show up to the tomb and who are the first witnesses to the risen Christ, perhapsbecausethey show this kind of defiance to the order of things so often attributed to God’s will, the very violence and vengeance that God defies by raising Jesus. It is because of that identity-claiming action, because of that special kind of resistance, that we even haveChristianity.

The powers that be know that lament is a dangerous thing. From the Lamentations in Jeremiah to the Chilean women who sang protest dirges clutching pictures of their missing loved ones during the reign of Pinochet, women have made social and political statements with their grief. But such resistance is hard to stop, for even the most sinister of regimes cannot shut down the grieving mother. Lament works to alter the narrative that controlling power wants to use, generating time in those deeper places, where our identity can be reinforced and fortified, where our humanity is lifted up and dignified.

David’s assumption is that his sacrifice of blood will bring back the rain, but the text tells a different story. After the murders, the drought continues. The rain doesn’t fall until verse 10, as a direct result of Rizpah’s grieving, as if God is not operating the way that David assumes. What if Rizpah hadsimply drifted into the background, assuming the identity that the culture grants her? Would David have changed his assumptions after the drought didn’t break, or would he have to double-down on his theology?

Rizpah’s actions reflect a theology in themselves, eventually forcing King David to respect the dignity of the dead by giving these victims of violence a decent burial, by acknowledging the value of these bodies. With this act, something of the humanity of Saul’s sons is recovered and Rizpah teaches us all a way out of this cycle of violence that comes from the recognition of a common humanity, from the lament that challenges the notion that some lives are more valuable, and therefore more grievable, than others. The action of God takes place in this story only when the value of all bodies is realized, just as the reality of “all lives matter” is fulfilled only when we can say with full and robust voices that “black lives matter.”

In lifting up the unheard voices in scripture over this season of Lent, we hope to provoke very serious and important questions to reflect upon as we prepare for Holy Week and Easter – just what is God up to? Where and how does God act? And what, if anything, does this have to do with us, with who we are, and who we seek to be as our identity?

When Jesus, in the wilderness, remembers his identity, a child of God, beloved of God and accepted by God, he is able to set aside the offers of illusionary power. The “devil” tempts him with the promise of all things that aren’t of God. The word that gets translated into “the devil” means the “slanderer” or the “accuser,” the one who speaks to abuse or wound. In psychological terms it is the voice that belittles and shames, the “you’re not good enough”, the demeaning self-talk that we are taught. That voice creates an identity in us, and notice what that identity uses to numb the very pain it inflicts – consumption, power, and safety. These are the same things that motivate the advertising which hammers away at us every day, trying to make us feel inadequate and then offering us a product to fix that inadequacy. It is the same force drives our politics, as more and more campaigns are forged entirely on the motivation of fear, with the promise that the candidate will keep us safe, and maintain our power.

What enables Jesus to defy this temptation is, perhaps surprisingly, the remembrance of his humanity, not his embrace of divinity. Rather than taking the bait and puffing up his own power, Jesus goes deeper, he embraces his weakness, he enters that same space that Rizpah enters, the space that lament takes us to, a space of deep reflection and even holy dependance, which is quite counter-intuitive in our culture. We’re supposed to be self-sufficient and independent, but the 40 days in the wilderness how us that Jesus becomes a divine symbol by being the most human he can be, acknowledging his weakness and placing his trust and his dedication in a God who promises him presence, not safety or comfort…a God who promises him enough, not more than he could ever consume…a God who offers him the power of love rather than the love of power. What “The Adversary” tries to get him to do is to think that HE can fix all of his problems, that HE has the power…power that is defined only by it’s ability to dominate and control, not to heal and to care.

We are all tempted over and over again by our own adversaries to forget our identity. We have our hearts broken and are told to “buck up.” Lament is out of the question, it is weak and useless. Instead you should get revenge, which is precisely what the adversary suggests. As we move more deeply into this Lenten season, I offer you a deeper drink of this water…the really cold stuff with a slight metallic taste because it comes from the deepest places. Refreshing and jarring, thirst-quenching and unexpected, this is a season to turn to different things, it is the season to turn our eyes to the cross, where we know that the “order of things” killed Jesus in the way it kills so many. It destroyed his body and buried him, thinking that was it. But God raised Jesus from the dead in order to demonstrate that God’s love is more powerful than all the hate in the world and that the life God offers is more powerful even than death. That, friends, is our identity.

Drink deeply.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Wide Angle
Luke 9:28-36

A powerful earthquake hit the halls of Christianity in the Unites States this past week.
The tremor was felt far and wide and, I suspect, there will be many aftershocks…maybe even a tsunami on the way. The United Methodist Church, unified since 1968 when it finally “decided” its position on segregation, is now, perhaps irretrievably, headed towards schism. It’s still over the issue of segregation, only this time the target is LGBTQIA+ people and their right to belong in a denomination whose official motto is, “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors.”

In case you don’t know, or don’t really understand what went down in St. Louis during what is called the General Conference, it was a special conference convened specifically to address divisions over LGBTQ+ issues in the church, specifically the inclusion of,
the marriage of, the ordination of, the belonging of, LGBTQ+ members.
Several months ago, the denomination’s bishops pushed hard for a resolution that would have allowed local congregations, conferences, and clergy to make their own choices about conducting same-sex marriages and ordaining LGBTQ+ pastors. This proposal, called the “One Church Plan,” was rejected by a small majority of the gathered delegates, who instead choose the so-called “Traditional Plan”, which keeps the decades old language of the Methodist rulebook, calling the “practice” of homosexuality incompatible with Christian teaching. It was not only affirming the bigotry that has been in place, it was doubling-down on it.

I, along with many of you, stand heartbroken with my siblings in the United Methodist Church, the church that raised me, the church to which my family remains actively connected. To be told by the church to which you belong, much less the church which may have baptized or married or even ordained you, that you actually don’t belong is an unimaginably painful thing. It has been happening for decades now, in single incident after single incident, including to people in this congregation. But now it is a wholesale rejection. And it breaks my heart.

Now, to be clear, it does not break my heart because I believe that I am right in promoting a Christianity that embraces ALL of God’s creation as created in that Divine image, though I do believe that. It does not break my heart because I insist that everyone agree with me on that issue, though I do think that is ultimately a matter of justice in the Church. It breaks my heart because apparently we cannot disagree with any sense of love whatsoever, as demonstrated to many of my colleagues by their fellow church members at a church gathering, with mean words, harsh glares and, eventually, this vote. There is no grace. There is no compassion or attempt to understand. There is only the law. At the heart of this conflict, within the Methodist church and beyond, lies our approach to this “law”, our response to Grace and the authority of scripture itself, a struggle between an emerging Christianity and an adherence to a fundamentalist “orthodoxy” that is not “the way it’s always been,” not “timeless”, not ancient – but relatively new in the long history of the “Christianties” that make up our tradition.

It seems to always start off like this – “The Bible Says…” But, you know, here’s the deal. It can be amazing what happens when you actually read your Bible, because it says lots of things. It does say that marriage is between one man and one woman…but it doesn’t only say that. It also says marriage is between one man and several women, between a man and his slave, between a man and his brother’s widow, or a male soldier and a prisoner of war. The Bible does say a few things about same-sex acts, but doesn’t describe same-sex attraction, love or relationships the way that we do now, nor does it speak to any number of 21st century issues – because every word was written a minimum of 2000 years ago! We have to use the Bible as a tool, a guide, not a rulebook. We read it to extrapolate wisdom, to discern and to help us find moral and ethical directives, using reason, experience and the tradition alongside scripture to find meaning, a meaning that can change as our reason and experience changes. Ironically, it was John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, who taught that model.

This is the United Methodist Church’s pain right now, but it is not just the United Methodist Church. We’ve been there, too. There are many of us here in this sanctuary this morning who can remember the painful, brutal “dialogue” that occurred in here in the UCC, in our own conference annual meetings, and at our Synod gatherings almost 15 years ago over this very issue. We can remember the debates, the number of times t
“The Bible Says” was trotted out and the ways that “Christian love” was wielded like a weapon. It was horribly painful, a time of great anxiety about the future, lament for what we were losing, fear about what might come. And I think that it’s fair to say that as we have gone down this path of openness & affirmation, it has been more beautiful and more wonderful than we imagined…the work of the Holy Spirit, changing our lives, our congregations, and our theology. And the Spirit is not done.

Photographers, especially those who practice photography as their art, often describe a picture by the choice of lens they used. Up-close, tight shots show you specific details, like the dew on the petals of a flower, while a wide-angle lens gives you context, like the storm that is producing the hard rain you thought was soft dew on those petals. Both perspectives are important, and both tell their own stories.

In some ways, what happened over the last weekend was both a tight close-up and a wide angle view of Christianity in the United States. The close-up is the very real and very lamentable pain and conflict caused by the confluence of the movement of the Spirit and the unwillingness to see past doctrine. And in a bigger sense it is about who we are as the Church, and what we think that following Jesus is all about. In the Book of Acts, one story of the origin of the church, the Holy Spirit specifically tells Peter that in order to experience God, he will have to disregard the law, step over doctrine and find a new authority. Will we, like Peter, listen to the Spirit telling us to go out into the world, setting aside the purity codes of our time, moving beyond the “law” that we have recreated to follow the one who cast out the law, reaching beyond our borders for those whom God sends to us and hearing a voice from the Spirit saying, “do not call profane what I have made clean?” When the Spirit commands Peter to seek “the other,” it wasn’t tolerance or “hate the sin, love the sinner” that was sought, it was welcome and embrace. The Bible, my friends, says lots of things. Our tradition has said lots of things. The real question is – what do we think that God is saying – right now?

The late, great church historian, Phyllis Tickle once wrote in her book, “The Great Emergence,” that the church holds a big “rummage sale” about every 500 years, and that we are entering another time of seismic shifts in doctrines, liturgies, practices, theologies and, perhaps most importantly, shifts in authority. The last “rummage sale” was the Reformation, in which the authority of the western Church was replaced with the authority of scripture. Prior to the Reformation, the western Church didn’t necessarily connect their actions to Biblical support, but afterwards – and particularly in the past 200 years or so – the church did the exact opposite, splitting up and causing rifts over the slightest scriptural distinctions in a dedication to scripture’s authoritative position. But the 500 year shelf-life of the absolute authority of scripture might be just about up.

Longtime Harvard historian Harvey Cox has argued that we are moving to an “age of the Spirit,” in which doctrine and dogma are replaced by experience and engagement. This age is driven by relationship and community, seeking a faith in which we know Jesus (and therefore God) by doing what Jesus did, by practicing our faith, not just declaring it. It is a much more slippery, much less tangible and far less certain way of being Christian than the version any of us grew up in or even near, where the authority comes from a complex discernment rather than a wooden, set rulebook.

I believe that we are waist-deep in this newness here at Fellowship, and probably need to swim out further. We question the mainstream practice of Christianity, jettisoning the certainty of pat answers for the trust of God’s Love and Grace, abandoning doctrine and “the law” for the slow process of discernment, the power of experience and the movement of the Spirit. From my perspective, and I trust the perspective of this church, the path of inclusion is more than just a growth strategy or a mission statement. It is the indwelling of the Spirit in our hearts, asking us, as it does throughout the Book of Acts, to step across the borders we have created, thinking that they were God’s borders, for that is where God is found. It’s not just a marketing strategy, or a refutation of the Bible, but an embrace of what we see as the Gospel, the good news of God’s Love for all people…ALL people.

The Church has far more often been just like Peter on the mountainside in our passage for today, seeing Jesus in shimmering light, making all the appropriate scriptural connections and pledging to stay right there – building some edifices to that moment and solidifying it as the revelation of God…while Jesus walks down the hill seeking God in the next moment, in the encounter to come, in the story that is yet to unfold. We have clung to tradition and custom as if they were God, practiced rituals as if they were jars that kept God vacuum-sealed and static, read scripture as if it were the actual words of God, chiseled in stone with a meaning that can survive time, culture, language and translation unchanged. We know that’s not true. Who we think God is, what we think God is up to in the world, how we can know or experience or understand God has all changed, many times, and is changing now.

As we prepare for the season of Lent, a time of reflection and introspection, we will begin with Ash Wednesday and the imposition of ashes, a ritual that is pretty old itself, and evokes even more ancient traditions. Ashes, after all, were the sign of mourning, the sign of lament, the sign of reflection that comes not of choice, but of circumstance. It is a chance to step back, to see that wide angle shot, and then to peer in for a close-up and to see what those perspectives can teach us. It is a time to witness the power of God shining before us and then to follow that light, away from static certainty into the Spirit’s call. Maybe it’s good that the Easter season is upon us, for the time for introspection is now – the Church needs to reflect on what it means to follow Jesus. We need to know that we have come, as the great Robert Frost wrote, to that divergence of two paths in the snow, to the road not taken, and we must choose in which direction we will walk. It will cost us something. We will lose things to that choice. It will be painful and soul-wrenching and worthy of great lament. And then, in a story familiar to us as Christians, then comes the true lesson of Easter…God’s action found in life, in death, AND in resurrection.

Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

The Impossible Gospel

Luke 6:27-38

Sometimes you have a sermon all prepared, an outline mapped out and some brilliant anecdotes to go along with it. And then sometimes your church moderator sends you an article from the New York Times…an op-ed she says reminds her about who we are as a church, and you read it, digest it and then hit delete on your keyboard.

It’s really an impossible task to write a good sermon about this text, which is part of a sermon itself, and a part of a sermon from Jesus, no less. It feels just as it’s impossible as the directives from this sermon and think about actually doing this in your life. Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you? It’s a little hard to process. Is it any wonder that we tend to lean on other parts of the Bible, like the ones that we can use to justify the stuff we’re already doing?

This sermon on the plain starts with the Beatitudes, like “blessed are the peacemakers.” Beatitude comes from the Latin beatitudo, which means a state of blessedness or happiness. This is Jesus’ sermon on what makes for happiness. If you search for sermons today on what makes for happiness, you’ll find sermons about building a good marriage or the power of positive thinking. You might find a sermon on generosity or the benefits of volunteering your time, or taking care of your physical and mental health. And all of those would be accurate portrayals, to one degree or another, of what we think makes for happiness. And noneof them would be the alternative version of reality that Jesus preaches with these words. I can’t imagine that “judge not” or “give to everyone who begs from you” washed down any easier in Jesus’ day than it does now, for he is asking us to do things that are so against our nature. I never had to teach my boys to retaliate against a punch with another punch. It was natural. I not only had to teach them todo that, I had to actively teach them not to do that! Their built-in inclinationwas an eye for an eye. And who would argue that such a sentiment drives so many of the systems we create, from our criminal justice system, to our economic systems, to our approach to guns? We know how to treat enemies, or opponents, or “the competition,” which we often couch in the language of enemies, and it isn’t to love them. That seems counterproductive. We’re supposed to hate our enemies. That’s why they’re enemies, right? Why would pray for people who curse us and even, as our text this morning translated the Greek, for those for those who abuseus? That’s a harsh and unwelcome directive, even offensive. For many of us, even the idea of forgiving our abusers, much less praying for them, seems impossible.

The article that Bobbie sent to me was from David Brooks, a NYT columnist who often gives keen and typically atypical insight into events and situations in the world. This was one of his more reflective op-eds which began with this sentence: “I start with the pain.” He described his speeches all over the country where he laments the isolation and social fragmentation that he sees all around us. And he recounts how often people come to him to tell him of a child’s suicide or overdose and how helpless he feels to say anything to them that seems useful. But he knows that pain is real, and sees it in those parents, in the African-American woman in Greenville who is, “indignant because young black kids in her neighborhood face injustice just as gross as she did in 1953,” in the face of the Trump-supporting business man in Louisiana who silently clenches his fists in rage as guests at a dinner party disparage his whole way of life.

Wait, what was that last one, pastor? Are you really going to make a comparison between an African-American woman’s pain over injustice and a Trump supporter feeling a little attacked? Well, no I’m not. David Brooks is, though. And when I first read it I rolled my eyes and tried to keep from disparaging the rest of the article because of that one line.

But then, a couple of days later, I was reflecting on the passage from Luke, this sermon on the plain, and the words of Jesus convicted my own heart from 2000 years away. Why would Jesus give us these impossible words? Why would he set us so against things that seem to come naturally to us? Surely he had been human long enough to have these feelings himself – the selfishness, the inclination for vengeance, the tendency to strike back, blow for blow? Did he say it just to be difficult, so that we might understand that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle?

I wanted to toss the article after that line from Brooks because I thought, at least in my gut, that a Trump supporter wasn’t worth my compassion, or even my listening. After all, they don’t listen very well, and their “way of life” I see as racist, misogynistic and homophobic. So why listen to them, I could hear myself say in my head, they are my enemy. I reveled in that feeling, like I was right and justified and moral. And then I remembered the passage for this grand sermon I was working on.

Dang it, Jesus. You really are exasperating.

Brooks went on to describe what he called a “social renaissance” going on all around us. It works against the breakdown of healthy connection to one another, transforming our inability to see the full dignity of each other and healing the culture of fear, distrust, tribalism, and shame that has grown so greatly.

He described a project from the Aspen Institute called Weave: The Social Fabric Project. It is a project that thinks globally, but acts locally, enabling community volunteers called “weavers” who engage dozens of different ways to impact the social fabric. The idea is that people, just everyday people who have subscribed to the idea of being a “weaver”, show deep hospitality in whatever they do, they keep showing up and being a place of welcome and relationship and community, where they are with what they have. While the world prizes and teaches and glorifies hyper-individualism, they swim against the stream. We are broken, the philosophy of Weave goes, and we need one another to survive. “We don’t do things for people”, a woman working with teenagers in New Orleans said, “We don’t do things to people. We do things withpeople.”

The people involved in this project, Brooks writes, “are not motivated by” money, power or status. They, “want to live in right relation with others and to serve the community good.” “We don’t just have a sociological problem”, he writes, “we have a moral problem.”

What do we think that Jesus was up to when he preached at these people gathered somewhere on a level field, listening to him share his wisdom? What do we imagine he is pointing us towards when he instructs us to offer our other cheek to those who have struck us, to give not only our coat to someone who asks, but our shirt, also? Why does he tell us to give to all who beg, to do unto others as we would have them do unto us, to love our enemies, to do good and to lend from what we have, expecting nothing in return if not to make a moral claim to us, if not to weave the world back together by first changing our own hearts?

And here’s where this gets real. I can’t do this. I couldn’t even read a single article without judging, tearing apart social fabric by protesting people who judged to be tearing apart social fabric. It makes me wonder, did Jesus say these impossible things expecting us to somehow rise to the to impossible? Or did he say the impossible to convey to us that the world is constantly being made and re-made, that we’re actually partof creating the world with each and every encounter, and the more of those that are built on love, the more in which we at least reach for compassion and understanding, the better the world will be?

Here’s what I know. My strategies only create a world fit for people who are pretty much like me, which is why it makes sense for me to subject myself to Jesus’ strategies, to literally surrender to them sometimes, not as an act demanding my absolute perfection, but as an objective, as my goal, as my orientation. When Jesus says, “My yoke is easy, my burden is light,” it’s because he’s trying to rewire us from just another set of laws requiring our blameless adherence, to our own awareness. I don’t think that Jesus wants us to be paralyzed into inaction with impossible tasks. I think he is asking us in this difficult sermon to keep refocusing our eyes on the far horizon, to keep our ears open to listen for goodness and hope, and to sustain our hearts with grace, clinging to it like a piece of driftwood in a storm. He is telling us to return, again and again, to the spiritual practice, the difficult work of showing hospitality and welcome, the slow pull of building relationship and community…to trust in the Love and the Grace of God to weave us all together.

It’s why I think he follows as he does all these impossible tasks with an equally impossible equation – we will be judged by the same measure with which we judge, condemned by the same tools with which we condemn, forgiven in equal measure to our forgiveness, and we’ll find life where we give life. It’s an impossible thing for meto do, which is precisely his point, I think…to take the burden of willing the world into perfection off the shoulders of we humans who cannot possibly reach that goal and place it instead where it belongs…with God, for whom the impossible ispossible.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Luke 6:17-26

In the Bible, mountains are the places where we seek contact with God. Mt. Sinai is where Moses receives the “Ten Commandments,” Mt. Moriah is where Abraham is stopped by the voice of God before he sacrifices Isaac, Mt. Hermon is where Jesus has an interaction with the Divine so powerful that it transforms him into shimmering light. Mountains, in Bible language, are where we go to encounter God. It is telling, then, that Luke places this sermon from Jesus on a level place, where he brings God to us, bearing his “God-talk” amongst the people, trying to teach us what God is really like through this sermon “on the plain,” as it is often called.

When Jesus puts forth these blessings, he is asking for us to think about God differently, to have different theology or “God talk” and, in doing so, to see the world differently. It’s not something we take to very easily, we humans. Jesus’ God and the God we have constructed are very different, and we resist the kind of grace, the kind of wasteful Love that Jesus teaches us is the essence of divinity. It’s one reason Jesus uses parable and story to spread the Gospel, for the good news comes to us slant. It has to because, like one of those “magic eye” posters, we can be staring right at it and miss it. It’s only when let go of our ideas about God long enough to actually experience God that we can see the kin-dom that Jesus preaches. If God is Love, as our Bible also attests to so often, and Love is rarely a respecter of laws or borders, then we must learn to see like Love sees, to act like Love acts. Yet we so rarely do, we humans. There is no system we have created on earth that is ruled by Love, which is why we have to pray “on earth as it is in heaven” in the Lord’s Prayer.

Maybe there’s a reason that Luke takes Matthew’s “sermon on the mount” and brings it down to the level places, evoking imagery from Isaiah, making the rough places smooth and leveling out the journey with some teaching that can help us understand what God is really up to in our world. But here’s a warning – be careful – God’s vision, what Jesus calls the kin-dom, turns our world upside down, changing all our values and norms and expectations. Jesus calls these world turning ideas “blessings.”

And when the Sermon on the Plain issues it’s blessings, it follows up with a series of woes. Woe is an expression of grief like, “woe is me.” But who says “woe is me” anymore, unless you’re trying to be silly? What it means for the purposes of this passage is something more like, “trouble ahead!” or “Look out!”

Now, that may not seem like a welcome or even appropriate thing to put after a blessing, but sometimes it is the very thing that needs to follow. We tend to think of life in terms of “either-ors,” as one side or the other, when most things we encounter are on a spectrum rather than a polarity. Beyond that, whether something is a blessing or a warning might depend on your point of view, or your perspective. We all know the stories of people who have won the lottery only to have that immediate and unearned wealth tear their lives apart. (Of course we’re all still willing to take that chance, right?) I am reminded of a story told in many ways, but I’ve heard it as a Taoist tale, told like this:

A farmer gets a horse, which soon runs away. A neighbor says, “That’s bad news.” The farmer replies, “Good news, bad news, who can say?” The horse comes back and brings another horse with him. A neighbor says, “That’s good news.” The farmer replies, “Good news, bad news, who can say?” The farmer gives the second horse to his son, who rides it, then is thrown and badly breaks his leg. “So sorry for your bad news,” says the concerned neighbor. “Good news, bad news, who can say?” the farmer replies. In a week or so, the emperor’s men come and take every able-bodied young man to fight in a war. The farmer’s son is spared. “Good news, bad news, who can say?”

Often things that seem initially like blessings can seem later like woes. Sometimes things than seem bad can turn out great. The truth is that these blessings and woes are more like dance partners than they are magnetic poles. Good news and bad news are interwoven, like a tapestry in our lives, not separate lanes of traffic flowing purely in one direction or the other. This sermon of Jesus is not a chance to offer us an either-or list, for we are all, at one time or another, recipients of blessing and woe. We must look deeper than that, for if you ask me, the lists that Jesus presents us with are reversed in our society. The things he calls blessings are curses and the things he warns about we celebrate and praise. But it isn’t that simple, for we often praise the wrong things and ignore that which is worthy of our attention. Jesus’ promise is the rainbow at the end of the storm, though that is a qualified blessing when the rain is pelting your face and the winds are knocking you over. And then his warning comes to those who might be so comfortable and confident that they don’t even hear it, for God is at work on us all – all the time.

It can be tempting to sentimentalize the Beatitudes, to domesticate them as a soft dream of an ideal way of life, where pain is over and sorrow banished. What they actually do, however, is issue a fundamental challenge, a challenge to our own eyes, to the way that we see the world and how we make meaning. On what, these blessings ask us, do we set our own happiness? Is it totally on earthly things, or solely on the spiritual side of life? Do we invest ourselves only in things that bring short-term contentment, or do we commit to a larger sense of reality, on the vision that grows past our own lives, not next year but seven generations from now? The woe to be found comes directly from the blessings, declarations of God’s love that will, in the very example of Jesus, turn things on their heads. And here’s one thing I know for sure — turning the world upside down may not be what we expect it to be at all. It might be difficult to accept. It might be challenging. It might actually cost you something.

The more I think about it, the more that I think that the coming of the kin-dom of God is, for us today, like the ending of racism and white supremacy. By this I mean that there are people who profess to love the ideals of the kin-dom, who embrace the declarations of the Beatitudes and the life and mission of Jesus…to a point. We have no one I know of clamoring to build a monument with the Beatitudes on it outside the Capitol. We rarely hear “blessed are the poor” from the halls of power. And we never claim the title of “happy” or “blessed” when people revile us for hanging a rainbow flag on our sanctuary in the name of a Jesus who reached out for the outcasts of his day. We certainly don’t seek that kind of confrontation and discomfort, nor rejoice in it when it happens. We like the idea of the kin-dom, we Christians, we appreciate these Beatitudes conceptually, but living out the reality is another thing altogether – especially when doing so might mean we change the way we’ve always done things, or interrupt our comfort zones. We might say, “Your kin-dom come,” but such a call, taken even half-way seriously, really challenges how the world is constructed and, for many of us, that construction works…or at least works enough to keep us placated.

In the same way, we embrace the ideals around the end of racism and white supremacy, but we’re invested in the world it has created. Even for those of us who are well-intentioned and engaged, the spectre of racism sneaks up – it reveals it’s ugly head in places we never anticipate and only then do we see how deeply the roots run, only then do we realize how entrenched it is in our systems, our mechanisms, our social structures. And often we fail to listen to the voices who are trying to tell us how invasive it is, dismissing them as reactive or dramatic.

In order to divest ourselves of the things that really do not build the kin-dom, we will often need to set aside our egos, our pride, our desire to be “right,” or our privilege – even privilege we don’t see at the time. This is precisely what I think that Jesus is getting at when he shifts to this list of woes, trying to help us understand that the kin-dom is worth it, the work and sacrifice today will build a better tomorrow. If we are only invested in our own comfort, then we have already received our reward.

The kin-dom does not ask us to put a new coat of paint on the way of empire, or to use the tools of oppression and tyranny only evoking the name of Jesus before we do it. It demands that we change our values, that we seek to be on the side of the poor, the weak, the marginalized, the stranger, the outcast, the “least of these” which has, in case you didn’t realize this, NOT been the strategy – here in the United States or perhaps anywhere in human history. The kin-dom, these blessings, they come with woes, with warnings that the so-called “good” comes with the so-called “bad.” They go hand-in-hand when you are working to restructure, when you are investing yourself in change, when you are busy turning the world upside down, which takes time and effort and sacrifice and pain and struggle.

It is almost like we have to have entirely new eyes, like our entire reality has to be scrubbed, the understanding of how things work, our value systems, our ethical and moral guidelines all scraped and primed and repainted. And, as anyone who has painted anything can tell you, that is a never-ending process.

Sometimes, friends, as we struggle to enact the kin-dom among us, we do it poorly. We make many mistakes, we can wound and hurt, divide and alienate, and our intent can be very different from our impact. Sometimes the good news can feel a lot like bad news. But I’m here to remind us all this morning that we have a God who makes all things new. Despite our limitations, our short-sightedness, our poor decisions, we have a God who brings a bigger vision, so that in our Good Friday pain, we can remember that Easter comes. May it come soon, and may God turn our eyes so that we can see clearly, and we can continue to work faithfully, taking in all the news that comes our way – good, bad – who can say?

AMEN.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Psalm 19:1-6 & Luke 4:14-21

Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, or made powerful by the Spirit.News that he was back spread far and wide through the countryside. He taught in their meeting places to everyone’s acclaim. Then he came to Nazareth, the place where he had grown up…

This is Luke’s start of the ministry of Jesus. It’s a dramatic story, but the Lectionary leaves out an important part with this morning’s cut. See, this ends with us thinking that Jesus is just being bold, stating that scripture is making history, right here and now – implying that it’s coming to fruition in him, like he’s the delivery of salvation. But the story continues after the part you heard read, after Jesus continues his sermon, calling out his fellow townspeople for their xenophobia and fear, challenging them that God’s liberation will arrive neatly prepared and packaged. That’swhen the gathered congregation grabs Jesus and drags him to the edge of a cliff, intending to throw him to his death. It is the same passage used for the sermon at my own ordination by the Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers, who took the opportunity to say – are you sure, Chris? There’s still time to back out of this whole preaching thing, ’cause you may come into it on fire to change the world and then get in trouble for just changing the bulletin.

When Jesus first arrives in Nazareth, the text tells us, he comes in the power of the Spirit, or made powerful by the Spirit. He comes with power. So I’d like you to picture what that might look like. What’s the first image that comes to mind if you say that someone walks into the room with power? Are they riding a white horse? Do they have on a particular kind of clothing? A suit with a power tie? A uniform? A cape? Do they have on bright, red heels? Are they carrying a weapon or brandishing a staff or a scepter? Do they have an entourage? How do we know when someone has power?

Well, I want us to notice something with Jesus. He comes with power before he ever says a word. I mean, he’s been teaching other places, he’s got a rep, but a rep only carries you so far. Preaching is far more than the speaking of words. You have to showsomething. Aren’t we more likely to hear the words of a person who has been there, more willing to get military advice from a combat veteran, or parenting advice from someone who has kids, or savior advice from someone who has felt like he needed to be saved?

Jesusliveshis words. He builds a reputation as the guy who eats with the sinners and the destitute, the unclean and the marginalized. He heals, in the face of a system that casts out people deemed “useless” or “used up.” He redeems and gives hope to those who have been so oppressed as to feel unworthy of such love, and, I have to assume, it is THIS kind of work that he has done in the these other meeting places all across the countryside. So when he shows up, it’s with more than words, it is with words made real by experience and life. The word, friends, has to be made flesh.

I’m not even sure that we recognize that kind of authenticity as power, yet it is exactlywhat the Spirit leads him to develop. That’s what his “40 days in the wilderness” is all about – a metaphor for the deconstruction and reconstruction of his soul that forces him to examine his claims, not just be able to say them louder than anyone else.

He pulls out the Isaiah text and reads,

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because God has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

That list starts off with bringing the good news to the poor, who are the very people Jesus plants himself in middle of, not as the center of charity, but as a politically provocative statement. Luke has several options in Greek to say “poor,” but he choosesptochos, which means those without resources, those reducedto begging, those destitute of wealth, education, property, prosperity, hope. Ptochosare the ones who have been madepoor. In the Isaiah words, made flesh by Jesus, they are to be liberated from systems that imprison and disable and crush people, in direct violation, Isaiah says, and Jesus embodies, of God’s will.

This is why he says that scripture is fulfilled, that it is coming alive right now, for his ministry will be a complete redefinition of power, known in his example. He will have toredefine power, for his people think they already know what it is. They have seen it in full force. Rome is power. The armies and the senate, the emperor and the empire – that’s power. But the power that Jesus brings denies that power’s legitimacy, picking up all of the people that “imperial power” discards and discounts. The power of Rome determines who matters and who doesn’t. The Power of the Spirit says, either all of us matter or none of us do. There’s little else more “fleshy” than that, my friends, for Jesus proclaims, in the words of the prophets before him, that there is life and death, and we are to choose life, and the things that give life. If our resources and wealth and abundance do not serve those on the margins, then we are on the path of death, we are serving a different power than the one that resides in and on Jesus of Nazareth. He uses the words of scripture to shine a light on his own time, his own space, his own hometown, seeking to reveal for them how they perpetuate the very systems they decry.

Who are the poor, the blind, the unaccepted, the ptochosnow? Is it the 40 million living in poverty right now, in the wealthiest nation on earth? Is it the 35 million without access to healthcare, those who cannot get clean water to drink, or even participate in the very political systems that imprison them because of voter suppression or the “New Jim Crow” that locks up more black and brown people than anywhere else in the world? Is it the parent fleeing violence and poverty in a distant land, come to the place of immigrants to seek asylum and met with a wall? Is it the almost half of transgendered youth who attempt suicide in our nation because there is no room for them at the inn? Where is the preaching that turns our eyes towards them? And what happens to the preachers who give those words flesh? What happens to the prophets, in the church and beyond the church, who point out our complicity with these unholy systems?

Jesus escapes the crowd dragging him to the cliff – I probably should have said spoiler alert there – and continues this ministry of word and action, taking every chance to turn people’s eyes toward the edges. So when we call for universal healthcare, when we demand criminal justice reform, when we seek the liberation of people of color from the racist systems we have created all around them, and chant “no wall,” we do so on the platform of Jesus Christ, the word made flesh. Let us not get caught up, as Rev. Barber says, in the puny language of left and right. We are not talking politics here, friends, we are being political. We are announcing the new kin-dom, the new empire of God’s love and justice, injected into our own systems, transforming them from cruelty to compassion, from punishment to promise, from hierarchy to hope.

We know all about power, friends, at least we think we do. We see the world’s version of it on display every day. We see it in an exchange between high school students and an elder in the Omaha tribe on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. We see it in the slow uncovering of corruption, lies and manipulation that gets played out before us in excruciatingly slow details, and we see it in a shutdown that finally broke not when right and left came together for the people, but when the people shouted out – when flight attendants’ and air traffic controllers’ unions said we’re going to shut down the airports and grind this thing to a halt. We see it in the constant battering of “build a wall,” when we know that the walls are really being built are in our own hearts. Yes, we know all about power. But power is power onlywhen it sets others free, only when it builds up others, only when used for the betterment of those around you.

How do we know that?

Jesus of Nazareth, come in the power of the Holy Spirit, come to give us life,

come to show us a better way.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Psalm 36:5-10
John 2:1-11

I threw a party once – a big one – where I made a special pie requested by the guests. A banana cream pie entirely from scratch. I had made it before, from an Emiril Lagasse recipe, with perfect crust, a firm and flavorful pudding and towering, fluffy mounds of whipped cream. The praise, if I do say so myself, was lavish. Unfortunately, I am the roulette wheel of chefs. I rarely do the same thing twice and use the directions as more of a guideline. So this time the pudding never quite set, and the whipped cream was good, but not great. Most ended up eating their pie out of bowls. As banana cream pies go, it was a decent pudding.

Despite our best laid plans, things go awry. This wedding party is supposed to deliver, but fails in multiple categories, not the least of which is the major social faux-pas of running out of wine. But no worries when you have invited the Son of God, right? Important reminder as you assemble your next guest list – always invite Jesus.

A miracle ensues and the guests are soon back to getting sloshed as they toast the happy couple.

Here is the point in the story when I usually say – wait a second! This is one of John’s seven miracle stories in his Gospel, more than any other gospel. The others include several accounts of healing, the feeding of the 5000 with a meager amount of food, walking on water and raising a man from the dead. Now, I don’t know about you, but getting some more wine for a party kind of pales in comparison. Is he just starting off slowly, kind of getting his feet wet with this whole miracle thing? Like, don’t start with raising the dead, it’s all downhill from there…

The wedding at Cana story resonates with some of the cultural practices of first century Judea, showing how Jesus fits into the natural flow of his day and age, and it serves, for John, as a backdrop for the many ways that his miracles not only “save the day,” but also alter the flow of the status quo. John, above all else, wants us to know that Jesus is special, like really, truly, differently special – sent among us as god with us, the Word made flesh, and his presence alone is holiness made real. This is decidedly John’s take on Jesus. When we ask who Jesus is, each Gospel fills in the blank differently. Take, for instance, the foundational public act of Jesus. For Matthew it is the Sermon on the Mount. For Mark, it is an exorcism. Luke has a return visit to his hometown and John has this – a miracle to start the ball rolling. This is why we have four gospels, because people couldn’t decide who Jesus was…just as we can’t seem to decide today who he is. Is he ransom paid for the sins of each of us in a cosmic bargain with an angry God? Is he teacher, Lord, savior and king? Is he just another in a long list of really good people, like Gandhi or Mother Teresa, or the man for whom this holiday was born – Dr. King?

Who we say Jesus was and how we shape the stories we read matters a great deal to who we think Jesus is now. Do we read the miracle stories in John’s gospel, for instance, as a sign of Jesus’ divinity, or as a way that Jesus interrupts the regular flow of life? Is Jesus just God in a human costume, or does Jesus encounter and struggle with life’s polarities the way that we all do? Is Jesus only here for the show, to make an impression and then be sacrificed? Or is his example actually something for us to emulate, not just admire?

Which Jesus you choose, or which Jesus is chosen for you, has a profound impact on what it means to you to be a Christian. And one of the reasons we have multiple gospels is that the different answers about Jesus help us to ask different questions and to balance our approach. If you are a Jesus with “no supernatural” stuff, these miracles are a challenge to your vision. Likewise if you are a Jesus’ sole purpose was to die on the cross as payment for our sins person, then the Sermon on the Mount asks for some reformulation. I’m not sure, frankly, that we ever find the “answer” for Jesus. In fact, I don’t think that is helpful, maybe not even possible. But continuing to search, to question and to wrestle is critical to fully lived lives of faith.

It is proper this morning to receive some enlightenment on this matter from one of the great poets of our time, maybe all times. Mary Oliver died this week and her legacy as purveyor of simple and profound wisdom will linger for a long time. She will be deeply missed. She once wrote:

You might see an angel anytime
and anywhere. Of course you have
to open your eyes to a kind of
second level, but it’s not really
hard. The whole business of
what’s reality and what isn’t has
never been solved and probably
never will be. So I don’t care to
be too definite about anything.
I have a lot of edges called Perhaps
and almost nothing you can call
Certainty. For myself, but not
for other people. That’s a place
you just can’t get into,

not entirely anyway,

other people’s heads.

I’ll just leave you with this.

I don’t care how many angels can
dance on the head of a pin. It’s
enough to know that for some people
they exist, and that they dance.

When we wonder which Jesus to hold onto as we survey the myriad of answers from our gospels, I offer a humble suggestion. Why not all of them? Don’t we think that the fundamentalist side of our religious tradition needs to embrace the loving, grace-filled, border-busting Jesus that we find in story after story? Don’t we think that “they” need to read the stories about Jesus condemning LGBTQ people and disempowering women because, we say glibly, there aren’t any? And, my friends, might we also need to read about miracles and the cross and the tomb and wonder what Jesus means beyond a great guy who taught us to be nice?

We need all the versions of Jesus to paint a complete picture. Yes, we also need nuance and definition, detail and substance so we can talk about Jesus as more than just a token. It’s when we think that we have it all figured out and we know exactly who he was and what he stood for that we lose the complexities that make our faith lives pliable, functional and meaningful.

Tomorrow we march again in the memory of Dr. King and the same issue applies to him. Which Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. do we honor? The “I Have a Dream” MLK? The “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” MLK? Is it the MLK who doubted his cause in his dining room after a threatening phone call? Is it the one who surely wept thinking of his family after numerous bomb attempts on his home, or after he was stabbed at a crowded speaking engagement? Is it the MLK constantly hauled into court for the most trivial of complaints, or the one filing his own lawsuits against the injustices of his time? Is it the one who said, “I have a dream,” or the one who said, “Again we have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that Capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor – both black and white, both here and abroad?”

As we do every year, King gets sanitized as the holiday rolls around. The same could be said of Jesus, who is kept as a tiny, 8 pound, 4 ounce baby sleeping peacefully in a manger rather than announced as the end of empire and evil…he is celebrated as King Jesus on an Easter Sunday (in April this year) without also acknowledging that this must then mean all our other kings– political party, economic system, war and profit, racial and gender hierarchies – would be subject to him. The baby and the lower case king are easier, friends, as isthe Dr. King who tells us with a gentle smile to love, while we leave out the sacrificial, privilege-eliminating, hierarchy-leveling costs of the very love he proclaimed.

We need all of the components, my friends, the Jesus of the Beatitudes and the Jesus of Calvary, the King who said, “the time is always right to do the right thing,” and the one who declared that there were “two Americas,” one which worked for some people and another a legacy of racism, slavery and poverty. You can’t hold up the Martin Luther King of tolerance and “get along” without also lifting up the Dr. King who denounced a military industrial complex and called for a guaranteed minimum income for all people, just as you cannot hold up a Jesus who “died for our sins” without reflecting on the number of times he pointed those sins out in parable and action.

May we learn in these complicated and troubling times, to find the comfort and the challenge from our prophets. May we breathe them deeply in, trusting that that Holy Spirit is guiding us. We have a long way to go. We still have food deserts and broken economic systems lingering from one of the worst race massacres in our nation’s history just a few miles from this sanctuary, almost 100 years ago. We have racial bias in our policing, our courts, our voting systems and our culture. We have a lot of work to do. What I hope we might do in this new year is re-pledge ourselves to this work, not as a race looking at some far distant finish line and trying to dredge up the stamina to keep running. No, my friends, rather as a way of life, as a mantra, as a matter of faithful living in this world, driven by our examples of people who lived and worked and even died for something that they would not see come to fruition. So work, rest when you need to, understand that you cannot – you ARE NOT – fixing the world, and focus instead on finding ways to participate. “If you can’t fly,” Dr. King encouraged us, “then run. If you can’t run, then walk. If you can’t walk, then crawl. but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.”

We thank you, O God, for the gift of Christ Jesus, the whole of the gift,

come to set us all free.

And we ask you this morning to bless the memory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – ALL of it.

Amen.